Watch with Stew: Jurassic Park (1993)

00:00:00               Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) remains the most successful dinosaur movie ever.  The logo, the core idea (of cloning dinosaurs to put them in a zoo) and some of the dialogue, as well as the dinosaurs themselves are imbedded in the popular consciousness.  With the fourth film, Jurassic World coming next summer, I thought I’d take a look at the original.  Now, I know Jurassic Park isn’t scientifically accurate.  Both intentionally and accidently the dinosaurs differ from what you’ll find in modern scientific texts.  But, scientific accuracy is a moving goalpost and not the purpose of a mainstream movie, so I shan’t dwell on that.

I remember this coming out in 1993 and being desperate to see it.  For reasons I can’t recall I got given Michael Crichton’s book and was told I couldn’t see the film until I’d read the book, which I did.  As much as I love it, my view of it the film has always been coloured that.  I won’t say that one is better than the other; they’re very different beasts.

00:00:52               The film opens with this sequence where a mystery animal in a crate is being transported to a high security pen.  It serves to create suspense and also ties in with the end of the film where the animals in question escape.  All three Jurassic Park films have used this opening scene to tease the island and the dinosaurs on it – in the second one it’s the little girl and the Compsognathus and in the third one you don’t actually see the dinosaurs, but something kills the crew of the speed boat.

00:01:08               First Jurassic Park logo.  This film loves reminding you what you’re watching.  There must be a drinking game where you drink each time you see the park logo.  Actually, forget you read that.  Always drink responsibly.

00:01:15               Here’s the late Bob Peck as Robert Muldoon, the park’s game warden.  This is one of his best scenes, as in the middle act of the film he has some really clunky dialogue to contend with – “We should’ve had locking mechanisms on the vehicle doors!”

00:01:49               Here’s the graphic letting us know where we are.  On the Blu-ray version I’m watching it says “Isla Nublar 120 miles west of Costa Rica”.  These look like they’ve been redone for high-definition and I’m sure that my old DVD and the original theatrical version said “Isla Nublar 120 miles of Costa Rica”.  If anyone can substantiate, please leave a comment below.

00:02:21               Peck’s delivery here is wonderfully weary. “Loading team, step away.”  It’s almost “Do I have to talk you through this every time?”  It suggests this is something that should be routine by now but these idiots in overalls keep making mistakes.

00:02:44               Not sure why the cage rolls backwards.  It seems like someone forgot to lock something down.  Muldoon didn’t say “Now lock the thing” so maybe it didn’t get done.  Still the whole bit with the cattle prods is great.  Shame they don’t reappear later in the film.

00:03:33               Martin Ferrero as Donald Gennaro or "Exposition Man", which is the primary function of this character.  Here he’s visiting a mine to deliver some exposition.  This amber mine is called Mano de Dios – Hand of God.  Now I’m not from the Dominican Republic so I don’t know how they feel about amber, but that seems like a rather grandiose name for a place where a semi-precious rock is dug out of the ground.

00:04:40               Gennaro should have concussed himself or at least have a bruise from the bang when he hits his head.  It would’ve been sort of funny for him to have a bandage on his head before they even get to the dinosaurs.

00:05:07               This shot of everyone looking at the amber with the mosquito entombed inside has a very Indiana Jones feel.  The way they gather round and the torchlight and the vocals on the soundtrack give the impression of having found an ancient relic with strange powers.

00:05:22               The scene at the dig in Montana.  The velociraptor claw being unearthed is a different colour to the rest of the skeleton and also to the rock the fossil is embedded in.

00:06:17               The sonar machine that maps the skeleton by shooting sound waves into the ground might be based on real science although I’m sure they’d dig them up.  I think it’s based on fact, but I’m not sure.  Google it.

00:07:03               Alan Grant (Sam Neill)’s techno-phobia is an interesting idea but it’s so heavy handed that it detracts from his character rather than adding nuance to it.

00:07:15               Grant suggests an evolutionary connection between dinosaurs and birds.  This is probably the first time this was said in mainstream media.  However raptor doesn’t mean “bird of prey” in taxonomy, it means “thief”.

00:07:36               “More like a 6 foot turkey.” Grant’s description of raptors hunting is wonderfully gruesome.  I didn’t notice, until I watched the film for this commentary, the vulture noises on this sequence.

00:09:11               Why does Grant hate kids?  Between this and his inability to operate machines, he seems like a bit of an arsehole for the first half of this film.  This is a particular problem as he’s our point of view character.  It’s an ensemble cast, but he’s the one we spend most time with.  We need to relate to him, but these two facets of Grant make him a caricature.  Another issue is that Ellie (Laura Dern) and Grant have very little chemistry.  Clearly they are meant to be a couple as at some point they must’ve had a conversation about starting a family.  But there’s no warmth here and I don’t believe Ellie and Grant ever even got off.

00:10:20               Enter the late great Richard Attenborough as John Hammond.  This Hammond is a much jollier and more likeable character than in the original novel.  The book’s Hammond is a cynical capitalist and seems to be on bad terms with all his employees.  I think this different take on the character was due to Spielberg casting Attenborough.

00:11:26               I said I wasn’t going to dwell on scientific inaccuracies but this is something I’ve not seen picked up on before.  Hammond says that he’s spent 5 years setting up the preserve in Costa Rica.  But when they get there all the dinosaurs in the park are adult sized.  Perhaps we know more about dinosaur growth rates than we did in 1993, but logically after hatching from an ostrich egg, a brachiosaurus could not reach a length of 22 metres in just 5 years.  That’s a growth speed of over four metres a year, not to mention an expediential increase in weight.  Perhaps the scientists developed accelerated growth or something to get round that problem.

00:13:11               Hammond convinces Ellie and Grant to come to the island less than three minutes after they’ve met him.  Obviously they need to go in order for the film to continue, but they’ve only just met and he doesn’t tell them what’s on the island.  Also I’d question whether getting funding for their branch of science is so hard that need to take this kind of dubious offer.

00:13:19               The Dodgson - Nedry scene; it’s not made crystal clear here, but Lewis Dodgson is an high ranking executive in a rival genetic company called Biosyn and is paying Nedry to steal the embryos from Jurassic Park so his company can reverse engineer them and create their own dinosaurs.  He is the main antagonist in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park novel.  You can get an overview of this character here; http://jurassicpark.wikia.com/wiki/Lewis_Dodgson.

This scene, which was very obviously filmed in Hawaii, shows waves crashing in the background but San Jose, Costa Rica is actually nowhere near the sea.  When the film was shown in Costa Rica, this graphic was removed.

00:13:38               Wayne Knight is great as Denis Nedry.  You really buy him as a disgruntled employee and this scene perfectly sets up his story.

00:15:18               Hammond tells Ellie and Grant that he has a jet at Choteau (a city in Montana) but it does look like they’ve taken this little helicopter all the way from Montana to Isla Nublar, i.e. the entire length of the US and central America.

00:15:32               Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm steals most of the scenes he’s in, particularly in this first hour.  All the chaos theory stuff serves to foreshadow what’s going to happen later on.  There’s so much more chemistry between Laura Dern and Goldblum than between her and Sam Neill.  Which wouldn’t be an issue where it not for the fact that Ellie and Grant are apparently discussing starting a family.

00:16:35               Hammond points out the window and says “There it is” but he appears to be sitting facing the back of the helicopter so wouldn’t be able to see the island.

00:17:24               The bit where Grant ties two seatbelts together is dreadful.  Not being au fait with computers is one thing, but not being able to do up a seatbelt is ridiculous.  We’ve established he’s not technology-minded but this makes him look like an idiot.  Also by tying two seat belt ends together not only has he endangered himself in the event of a crash, but left Ellie with no protection at all.  Why would she want to have kids with this guy?

00:18:19               There’s a distractingly large dent in the helicopter door as Hammond etc. are getting out.

00:18:43               Why does the helicopter leave?  Considering the potential risks on the island and apparent lack of medical facilities, they should have a helicopter or some other means of reaching the outside world on hand at all times.  It would certainly save a lot of bother later on.

00:20:10               Ellie is examining a leaf from a species of plant that became extinct in the cretaceous period.  The shot where she picks it was in the trailers but isn’t in the film.  How did they recreate extinct plants?  This is never explained.

00:20:20               Our first full shot of a dinosaur!  The special effects in this film still stand up, even after 20 plus years.  The brachiosaurus in these shots actually looks better than the ones in Jurassic Park 3, which are sluggish, flabby and camouflaged, which makes no sense for the 22 metre long, 35 tonne animal – where’s it going to hide?  Anyway back to this film.  These first shots of the brachiosaurus are great and in 1993 they just blew everyone’s mind.  It really felt like looking at a living dinosaur.  Ellie and Grant’s reaction is interesting; immediately debunking outdated assertions about dinosaurs; “this is a warm-blooded animal” and so on.

00:21:32               From seeing the brachiosaurus, Gennaro starts talking about how much money they’ll make.  As a lawyer representing companies or individuals that have invested in Jurassic Park, it’s not clear how he stands to profit from its success.  This is the result of two factors.  The first is Hollywood’s tendency to present lawyers as money-grabbing bastards.  The second is that in the novel and early drafts of the script there was a character called Ed Regis, the park’s PR manager.  In the novel it’s he who pees his pants and runs just before the T. rex escapes.  Seems the characters of Gennaro and Regis were merged, leaving the lawyer with some lines that sound a bit like he’s working for Hammond.

00:21:42               “We have a t. rex!” This is an odd way to introduce the idea of the tyrannosaurus rex being in the park.  It has nothing to do with what they’re talking about and it would have been more of a surprise if saved until they were on the tour.  They say T. rex so many times in this film, I think it popularised the use of the term, in the UK at least.

00:22:13               The wading brachiosaurus in the long shot don’t have any water running off them as they come out of the lake.

00:23:37               The out of a job/ don’t you mean extinct? Exchange is based on something stop-motion effects veteran Phil Tippet said when he saw the first CGI dinosaur test shots and Spielberg had it put into the script.

00:24:02               Would Hammond really have done this acting to the screen every time the film was shown once the park opened?

00:24:53               The Mr DNA film expertly dresses up a lot of exposition in a nice package and in a way that perfectly fits with the context of the film.

00:28:10               As they enter the lab we hear Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) over the tannoy reminding everyone to be on time for the boat.  But why is everyone going home for the weekend?  Plot wise, it reduces the cast to the core characters (something they didn’t bother to do in the sequel) but realistically there should be more people on this island; they’re trying to get the place ready to open and this is the first time the park’s had visitors.  Not only is there the safety issue, there’s also the issue of providing food and room service.

00:28:14               B.D. Wong as Henry Wu.  Like many of the supporting characters, Wu has a much larger role in the novel.  Amongst other things, he argues for engineering more docile versions of some of the dinosaurs.

00:29:21               So here’s our second dinosaur; the hatching baby raptor.  It never blinks.

00:29:39               Malcolm and Wu talk about the dinosaurs breeding.  Again looking at the novel, the issue of the dinosaurs reproducing is much more significant.  There are three conditions for maintaining control of the island; keeping the dinosaurs in their cages, keeping them on the island and preventing them from breeding.  In the book all three of these fail pretty early on.  It might have been nice to have this framework in the film, thus adding a few more threads to the plot.  Once the systems are back online, they could have contacted the boat to get it to turn around, thus delaying the characters’ escape from the control room.

00:31:41               The raptor pen.  I like this location and the way its look contrasts with the white walls and smooth lines of the Visitor Centre.  But if they bred 8 raptors originally, surely this pen is too small; no wonder they were trying to escape.  This is also the first of many enclosures with far too much vegetation - more on that later.

00:32:52               Enter Muldoon.  All this talking about the raptors feels like overkill.  So it’s saying dinosaurs weren’t stupid and that’s a good thing, but the “extreme intelligence” isn’t really born out onscreen.  So they open some doors; cats and dogs can do that.  Also, they don’t need to be this super intelligent ultimate hunter; they just need to be smarter than we think they’re going to be.

00:34:02               The harness that lowered the cow in emerges torn and broken (but not bloodied?) – what a waste of harnesses.

00:34:32               “We can charge anything we like.” – More Ed Regis dialogue from Gennaro.

00:38:08               Enter the kids, Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello).  Yes they’re annoying but, as Hammond says, they’re the target audience and actually when they’re not being used very baldly for comic relief they give really good performances.  In the novel the kids’ ages are reversed and Tim is both the dinosaur and computer fanatic.  The 8 year old Lex in the book serves very little purpose.  Here their characters are much better balanced.

00:40:27               The park control room; this is a great set, with the round windows and the fossils in the pillars.  If you watch in the shot where the theatre/ ride revolved to reveal the lab earlier, you can see the control room on the far left.  I imagine that in the full version of the ride Mr. DNA went on to talk about the control room “...where our advanced computer systems keep y’all safe while you’re out in the park” or something.

00:41:42               Malcolm’s line referencing King Kong as they enter the park unnecessarily flagpoles the fact that the gate is based on the one from the 1933 movie.  It’s like they wanted to make sure everyone got that piece of intertextuality, rather than just slipping it into the film quietly.

00:41:57               The tour voice is indeed Richard Kiley, American stage and screen actor who also narrated the Planet Earth documentary series in 1986.  Kiley is the tour voice in the book and it’s nice they got him for the film.

00:43:10               Here we see Nedry on the island and get a bit more of his backstory.  Of all the supporting characters, Nedry is probably the best written.

00:49:01               We see the boat at the east dock.  In the book Tim and Grant see the boat from the tour and see raptors on the deck, leading to a subplot where they have to get the boat to turn around before it reaches the mainland.

00:49:58               50 minutes into the film we see our third dinosaur.  The sick triceratops is the only animatronic dinosaur we see out in the open in broad daylight.  We see it from multiple angles and the actors are touching it and interacting with it.  This takes things to a sense of realism beyond the CGI long shots from earlier and you see the characters getting really taken in too.

00:51:03               Here is Dr Gerry Harding, another supporting character whose part is greatly reduced from the novel.  It’s a shame we don’t get to find out what’s wrong with the triceratops.  Ellie seems to get half way, then the scene stops after the dinosaur poo gag.

00:53:04               The piles of dinosaur poo are ridiculously huge and compacted.  Also I don’t think they check them properly.  This is the beginning of the film’s obsession with dinosaur bodily excretions.

00:54:50               Hammond laments the first tour and here is the problem with this section of the film; the enclosures are so full of plants any dinosaurs would be hidden.  I see why they did this; to build suspense until the fences are shut down and the dinosaurs escape.  Another reason is that in 1993 the effects technology was new, it was expensive and they had to use the shots where it really counted, which is in the second half of the film once the dinosaurs have escaped.  Still, having foliage so dense that a 7 tonne T. rex can disappear, stretches credulity too far.  Maybe they could’ve hinted at the T. rex like with the raptor in the opening sequence or had another herbivore on show just to make for a more plausible zoo experience.

00:55:50               The scene where Grant and Malcolm talk about kids in the car feels so contrived; would you really have that conversation with some you’ve known for a day?  Also Malcolm’s “always looking for a future ex-Mrs Malcolm” line makes him sound like such an arsehole.  All it seems to do is fill in time while Nedry gets to the lab, which is right next door to the control room.

00:57:11               And here Nedry is, stealing the embryos.  He’s told by Dodgson to get all 15 species, but we only see 7 species in the flesh (Brachiosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Velociraptor, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Dilophosaurus and Gallimimus).  In addition we see Proceratosaurus, Metriacanthosaurus and the misspelt “Stegasaurus” embryos being put in the shaving foam container.  It’s not clear what the other 5 species are but you can probably add dinosaurs from the sequel such as Pachycephalosaurus and Compsognathus.

00:59:47               The guy with the pipe on Nedry’s desk is J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the inventors of the atomic bomb.  A comment on the misuse of scientific power perhaps?

01:00:46               Conversely to their previous scenes, the exchange between Grant and Malcolm when he gets back in the car is good; it feels natural and it’s kind of funny.

01:01:47               As a piece of action, the T. rex attack on the two cars is practically faultless.  The suspense is built brilliantly in elements such as the vibrations in the water glasses and the snapping cables.  The reveal of the rex is awesome too.  Then we see most of the attack from inside the tour cars which makes it so much scarier because it feels like it’s happening to us.  Also with touches like the dinosaur’s breathing and the contracting pupil the rex is much more like a hunting animal than a movie monster.  This is the longest sustained sequence of dinosaur action in the film.

01:09:12               One slight detractor is that the geography of the scene here is confusing or confused.  The T. rex appears to push the wrecked car back through the fence it broke but now there’s a 100 foot chasm behind it, which wasn’t there a few minutes ago.  It’s like we’ve changed location without moving.  This sequence with Lex and Grant below the car is the first of several where characters are in peril that doesn’t directly relate to dinosaurs.

01:09:41               The wrecked car crashes down into the tree.  I’m unconvinced Tim would survive that.

01:12:04               Nedry and the dilophosaurus; this scene plays out brilliantly, with Nedry not recognising the threat from the dinosaur until it’s too late.  The way the sounds change when the dilophosaurus reveals its true nature is wonderful.  The colour and textures on this dinosaur, particularly the one in the car, is slightly reminiscent of the bad gremlins (Gremlins, 1984).  Nedry’s death could have been more gruesome (it certainly is in the novel) but then this film pushed the boundary of what you could show in a PG as it is.

01:14:23               The can of embryos getting covered over with mud feels like a set up for a sequel (it wasn’t).

01:17:53               As the mangled tour car falls through the tree it should be forced away from the trunk by the branches.  The way it’s falling here is a little neat and convenient.  This is another sequence that ups the danger but doesn’t feature a dinosaur.

01:19:26               Malcolm is found under the wreckage of the restroom, but his shirt is undone and he has a tourniquet on his leg.  I don’t think he could’ve done that whilst under the wreckage, so did he cover himself up again?

01:20:53               The T. rex jeep chase sequence; this must’ve been one of the first digital sequences finished for the film because the shot of the jeep smashing through the fallen tree followed by the rex was one of the few shots using CGI in the trailers and TV spots. I recall that there were no CGI images in the pre-publicity for this film, which is hard to imagine when you look at modern summer blockbusters.

01:21:31               For a film with so many special effects, the back projection behind Malcolm really looks bad.

01:23:41               Grant takes the fossilised raptor claw out of his pocket and throws it away.  Surely it would have broken by now?

01:24:51               The gift shop is full of actual film merchandise.  It also has sabre-tooth cat soft toys, which seems a little off message.  Maybe they came mixed in packs with the dinosaur toys.

01:27:30               Why is Ellie so sure the park in unsalvageable?  As far as they know 1 dinosaur has escaped, 1 person has died and 1 is injured.  Alright Grant and the kids are missing but I not sure this warrants writing the whole thing off.

01:28:34               In the book, Grant and the kids spend the night in a maintenance building in the triceratops paddock, which makes sense; seeking refuge in something man-made.  Also they could’ve dressed their injuries, maybe tried to call for help.  A baby triceratops was made for such a scene before it was cut and the action moved to the tree with the brachiosaurus – and the dinosaur snot.  So we’ve had, poo, spit and snot.  Let’s be grateful they stopped there.

01:30:25               Grant finds the egg shells.  So the dinosaurs are breeding.  In the last shot we see tiny raptor footprints leading away from the nest.  So my question is what about the raptors that laid these eggs?  At this point no raptors have escaped that we know about and we’re at least a mile from the raptor pen.  So we find out that some dinosaurs have bred, but it’s not to the point where there’s an unsustainable population explosion. It seems like there was an obligation to keep some elements from the book in the final film, even though they don’t really have any bearing on the story.  Which brings me to…

01:32:23               The lysine contingency; this feels like exposition left from a previous draft of the script.  It serves no function here because it’s not an answer to the current predicament and it’s the only suggestion in the whole film that dinosaurs could leave the island.

01:33:00               Samuel L. Jackson is of course great and it’s a shame he’s in it so little.  I love the line “hold onto your butts” and it would’ve been nice if it has cropped up in the sequels, like a Jurassic Park equivalent of “I have a bad feeling about this.”

01:34:04               The stampede sequence was filmed on the same location as the scene where Indy is chased by the Hovitos in Raiders of the Lost Ark, according to the Making Of book.

01:36:02               Ellie comes down the stairs muttering “something’s happened” and so on.  People talk to themselves a lot in this film.

01:37:58               The raptors have escaped!  If only the three guards we saw earlier hadn’t left for the weekend.

01:41:50               There’s great cross-cutting between Ellie switching the power on and Grant and the kids on the fence.

01:43:10               Tim’s refusal to jump is a bit silly, but not as daft as his being electrocuted which, let’s face it, should almost certainly have killed him.

01:43:48               After condemning the park to Hammond the previous evening, Ellie uses the phrase “back in business” as soon as the power comes back on.  This line feels like it was put in so it could be used in trailers; what you might call ‘trailer fodder’.

01:44:12               Arnold’s arm drops on Ellie’s shoulder, but where’s the rest of him?  Also you wouldn’t get Samuel L. Jackson killed off-screen in a movie now.

01:44:44               Muldoon hunts the raptors; a great scene and one of the only ones where you see a predatory dinosaur essentially doing nothing.  Like the baby, the adult raptors are rather dead eyed.

01:45:30               “Clever girl.” Classic last line.

01:46:53               The Visitor Centre sets are so lavish and detailed.  The murals were inspired by Charles R. Knight’s natural history murals in the Field Museum in Chicago and have a similar blue-green palette.

01:47:11               Here’s a gratuitous shot of Laura Dern’s bum.  She’s limping in this scene but it’s not clear why.  Also her salmon pink shirt has vanished.

01:47:58               After the t. rex attack, the raptors in the kitchen sequence is the standout set piece in the film.  It’s brilliantly paced, suspenseful and dinosaurs in enclosed spaces hadn’t really been done before this.  The unique threat of the raptors, more than their intelligence, is that they can follow you into more places than a bigger dinosaur.  There's also the sense of the unfamiliar in a familiar place, which is always scary.

01:51:59               Raptors can kill grown men but can’t overpower these two children pushing a door? Hmm.

01:52:50               I like that Lex gets the computer system up and running again because it means she achieves something and makes her seem a bit less like baggage.  Not sure what Tim’s doing in this scene though, except possibly trying to rub his tummy and pat his head at the same time.

01:54:42               Why does Hammond yell down the phone not to shoot the raptor?  Would he rather they ate his grandchildren?

01:55:27               When this shot where Lex nearly falls through the ceiling was filmed, the stunt actor looked into the camera, revealing her face.  Ariana Richard’s face was composited into the shot in post-production.

01:56:06               So we get to the finale in the main hall with the dinosaur skeletons which was teased earlier in the film.  The original ending had Grant killing the raptors with a crane, but Spielberg had it rewritten in order to bring the T. rex back, feeling she was the ‘hero’ of the film.  The climax of the film certainly would have felt a little flat without it.

01:57:10               This is the only time the T. rex doesn’t make a sound before striking.  It even manages not to shake the ground.

01:57:44               Now Hammond has given up on his park, but 3 minutes ago he was telling Grant not to shoot the raptor, which suggests he was still thinking it was salvageable.

01:57:58               The T. rex kills the second raptor and destroys its fossil counterpart.  Yay, dinosaurs are great!

01:59:04               There’s this moment where Ellie is looking at Grant and the kids, like he’s now ready to have kids of his own, but because they’re not a very convincing couple to start with it doesn’t quite ring true.  Besides, it’s like she’s saying “because you got these kids back safely, when we get back to Montana we’re going to pork like crazy”, which is creepy.

01:59:33               Not sure what the pelicans flying alongside the helicopter signify.  Is it representing the return to the modern world or is it affirming the bird-like characteristics of the dinosaurs?  Or maybe it’s just a nice peaceful image to end on - who knows?

02:00:08               End credits roll.  There you have it.  So the movie is a much stripped down version of the novel.  The plot is light; look past the scenes explaining the cloning, the amusement park and the disgruntled employee who causes the shut down and you have the plot of nearly every dinosaur flick since The Lost World (1925), i.e. People get trapped in a place where there are dinosaurs and have to escape.  There are some ‘orphaned’ subplot elements that don’t go anywhere and there’s some clunky characterisation too.  These issues could have been ironed out with a bit more script work.  If Jurassic Park was being made now the script might have had that extra polish.  But ultimately none of that matters.  Few people did or ever will come to this movie for real-life human characters or complex plotting.  The aim of this film was to make the most convincing dinosaur film ever.  It did exactly that.  Read any number of recent reference books and you find writers are still correcting preconceptions from this movie.  That’s a powerful endorsement of its success.  For further proof, note that Jurassic Park did not spawn a wave of other dinosaur movies.  Even its sequels (thus far at least) essentially rework the same plot to diminishing returns.  All of which proves it is quintessential and frankly unbeatable.